The Giganews Accelerator is a Windows based application which enables Giganews account holders to download compressed newsgroup headers and utilize Giganews’ encrypted Usenet access services.

In addition to supporting 256-bit SSL encrypted Usenet for Giganews account holders with SSL enabled, the Giganews Accelerator encrypts all authentication and NNTP commands for every customer, regardless of account level. Encrypted authentication solves a long standing security concern with Usenet access accounts, and encrypted NNTP commands will help some customers avoid traffic limitations on networks between Giganews and their computer.

The header compression function of the Giganews Accelerator will allow for header download speeds up to 10 times faster than with uncompressed headers, a feature particularly helpful to Giganews users who utilize news reader software which downloads all new headers in a newsgroup every time a newsgroup is accessed (Example: Newsbin).

I must have been asleep at the keyboard, as Giganews recently announced they will now have 200 days of binary retention by the end of summer!

That’s one heck of a lot of data. With a newsfeed currently pushing 3.5TB per day that works out to around 700TB and is high enough to now count in Petabytes at .7PB. That’s unheard of in all of usenet history.

In addition they are currently not expiring any text articles and are currently at 1400+ days of text retention.

Kudo’s go out to Giganews for kicking some butt in the retention wars.

One of the most annoying things on usenet is sporge. What is sporge some might ask?

Sporge is short for spammed forgery, simple enough in it’s name, but it’s use makes some users go mental.

When someone decides to sporge a group they typically take a popular posters nym (their name or nick on usenet) and make fake, false, incomplete or misleading posts using that nym.

So what eventually is supposed to happen is the sporger trashes the posters good nym. However this usually doesn’t happen since most of usenet is smart enough to be able to read headers and most sporgers are too dumb to know that headers exist.

Typically a sporger will post from a free account, or a proxy, or sometimes even their own ISP. Intelligent usenet users will see the change in the posters headers and know that the sporger is a total lamer. However for the few who don’t know anything about usenet other than it’s a place where they can talk kewl and get all sorts of free software and mp3’s it’s a different issue.

The newbies (I don’t care if they’ve used usenet for 20 years, if they don’t know what a header is and how to read it then they’re a newbie) whine and complain that the posts are garbage and they actually start replying to the sporger asking them to stop or to post par files for the incomplete posts and all sorts of other stupidity.

A good sporger will get an account on the same ISP or NSP as the poster and make sure their sporge is a true forgery of the origional posters. These guys are good at what they do, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Yes usenet is a great place, but if you’ve only got half a brain then shut off mommies computer and go back to your calculator. Learn something about the system you’re using (it might actually shock you to learn, but it’s good for you) and stop feeding the trolls.

Sporge sucks, if you don’t want to see it then learn to killfilter. Of course once the sporge has stopped the real poster will still be killfiltered, but at least the rest of usenet doesn’t have to deal with more stupidity.

I’m not elitist, I think usenet is for everyone. But I do think there should be a test before anyone is allowed to touch a computer. And if you fail, all the money in your bank account is donated to buy spam filters for third world countries.